Big History
08/31/2009 16:11
David Christian, Maps of Time (first look)
Five hundred pages of text, fifty pages of notes, thirty pages of bibliography. Christian begins at the beginning, with the Big Bang. I’m about 125 pages into the book, and multi-cellular organisms are just starting to appear. In other words, I’m still about 600 million years from the beginning of what we normally consider history.
So far, the text has been interesting and very readable. I’ve read a little about the cosmology and biology he’s covered. Enough to know that he’s covering the high points well, and leaving out a lot of detail. This is inevitable, and while it might not make an evolutionary biologist happy…then again, maybe it would!
The whole thing is about context and communication, I suppose. It’s interesting to me that the genre he’s writing in really goes back a way – at least to Robert Chambers’ Vestiges in 1844! He’s probably exposing a lot of people to this science for the first time. And, depending on what he does once he gets to the “historical” period, maybe he’ll be able to get us to look at that from a new angle.
In the introduction, Christian claims his two major influences are Annales-style longue durée history and Jungian mythologizing. The archetype he seems to want to use to unite the macro (geological/biological) and micro (human social) histories is apparently the image of running up the “down” escalator. The impulse of things (mainly life, but he extends it to stars and cultures) to fight entropy: to build order out of the growing chaos all around.
This is a different archetype from Eliade’s eternal return or Yeats’s gyres. And it’s different from Hegel & Marx’s teleology. It’ll be interesting to see where he takes it.
Five hundred pages of text, fifty pages of notes, thirty pages of bibliography. Christian begins at the beginning, with the Big Bang. I’m about 125 pages into the book, and multi-cellular organisms are just starting to appear. In other words, I’m still about 600 million years from the beginning of what we normally consider history.
So far, the text has been interesting and very readable. I’ve read a little about the cosmology and biology he’s covered. Enough to know that he’s covering the high points well, and leaving out a lot of detail. This is inevitable, and while it might not make an evolutionary biologist happy…then again, maybe it would!
The whole thing is about context and communication, I suppose. It’s interesting to me that the genre he’s writing in really goes back a way – at least to Robert Chambers’ Vestiges in 1844! He’s probably exposing a lot of people to this science for the first time. And, depending on what he does once he gets to the “historical” period, maybe he’ll be able to get us to look at that from a new angle.
In the introduction, Christian claims his two major influences are Annales-style longue durée history and Jungian mythologizing. The archetype he seems to want to use to unite the macro (geological/biological) and micro (human social) histories is apparently the image of running up the “down” escalator. The impulse of things (mainly life, but he extends it to stars and cultures) to fight entropy: to build order out of the growing chaos all around.
This is a different archetype from Eliade’s eternal return or Yeats’s gyres. And it’s different from Hegel & Marx’s teleology. It’ll be interesting to see where he takes it.
Slavery
08/27/2009 19:57
On the other hand, a lot of work seems to have been done in recent years, situating slavery in the development both of capitalism and of the “atlantic world.” International trade, which “immensely stimulated the production of staple crops” at the expense of a more balanced, internally-focused agricultural economy, encouraged large-scale operations and slavery as an economically “rational” solution for labor. (We still need to develop an economics that prevents short-sighted, immoral, and socially destructive practices like slavery from seeming rational.)
W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Winthrop Jordan, Richard Dunn, and David Brion Davis all look like people I’ll want to circle back around to, when I have the time. The two selections in the chapter, one by Breen and Innes and the other by Higginbotham, address the question of which came first, slavery or racism?
Breen and Innes begin (the excerpt is from “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676) by reminding the reader that “Men have been enslaving one another for over three thousand years, receiving philosophic justification from every major Western thinker from Plato to Locke.” They claim “there was nothing inevitable about the course of race relations, at least in the years before Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The idea that “race itself becomes a sufficient cause for behavior,” they say, “flies in the face of social reality.”
Breen and Innes criticize authors who rely too heavily on Virginia statute law. “Statutes usually speak falsely as to actual behavior,” they say, quoting Winthrop Jordan, who went on to try to justify his use of them. They reject Jordan’s argument that statutes at least reveal “communal attitudes;” countering that “many whites were indentured servants,” who felt so much common cause with their black neighbors that “the House of Burgesses became sufficiently worried about the unruliness of the colony’s landless white freemen that they disenfranchised them.” In fact, they suggest, later Virginia statutes can be viewed as attempts to pry apart poor white and black Virginians, to prevent them from challenging the Colony’s power structure.
Much has been made of a piece of 1640 legislation that has been interpreted as an order to disarm black Virginians. Breen and Innes show this to be an error, reviewing the wording of the law and citing later court records dealing with guns which clearly do not deny blacks the right to bear arms. They review several cases in which runaways were caught and punished, which have been used to suggest unequal treatment. Breen and Innes admit this possibility, but call attention to the fact that blacks and whites ran away together, apparently trusting each other with their safety and futures, if not their lives. This reinforces their point, that “the possibility of large-scale, interracial cooperation continued to worry the leaders of Virginia.”
Finally, Breen and Innes challenge the argument that court records that list the race of participants are evidence of racism. The records did not in fact list race all the time, they say. “Many routine items – the sale of land and livestock for example—did not carry the convenient racial indicators.” Once historians realize that some of the “normal” court transactions involved black people, they say, they may be able to widen their view of black history beyond the “sexual and criminal activities that presently occupy a disproportionate place in the analysis of early American race relations.”
The second selection, from Shades of Freedom by A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., probably should have been put first in this chapter. Breen and Innes were clearly criticizing this author and his belief that the early Virginia legal tradition represents an effort by racist whites to institute race differentiation as a precursor to establishing lifelong, hereditary slavery. Higginbotham, a former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, limits his discussion to the judicial record. There are no details in his analysis from outside the judgments.
“When the first Africans arrived at Virginia in August 1619,” Higginbotham says, “they were initially accorded an indentured servant status similar to that of most Virginia colonists.” While he admits that unlike indentured whites, the blacks came involuntarily with no contract for eventual release, he says an equally important reason for their difference from white servants was that “since the fifteenth century, Englishmen had regarded blackness as “the handmaid and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion.” Higginbotham seems to be quoting Jordan, and apparently believes this attribution proves the claim, because he doesn’t try to support it further.
I’m actually really pleased that I was able to comment on Breen and Innes first, because it gave me an opportunity to talk about something other than religion. Unfortunately, just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Higginbotham’s premise in Shades of Freedom is that the notion of black inferiority was the chicken to slavery’s egg. His experience as a federal judge showed him that a presumption of inferiority continued to influence the highest levels of public policy. Fighting this prejudice is a heroic goal; unfortunately, Higginbotham’s claims about racism in this selection can be sustained only if you avoid looking at the elephant in the room with him, which is religion.
“Prior to 1680,” Higginbotham says, “the colonies would often follow the Spanish and English practice that blacks who had been baptized into the Christian religion were to be accorded the privileges of a free person.” He doesn’t specify what these privileges were – clearly becoming Christian didn’t make you free. This is demonstrated by one of the cases Higginbotham goes on to cite.
In the first case, Re Tuchinge, 1624, “John Phillip A negro Christened in England” is allowed to testify against a white defendant. Higginbotham claims the language shows the court’s assumption of a black man’s inferiority: “In a jurisdiction where black did not carry the stigma of inferiority…the blemish of his race would not need to be washed clean by the grace of his Christian religion.” That’s a possible explanation. Another is, that non-Christians could not swear and testify in court. They had no standing in the English legal system (the “disability” of non-Christians lasted into the nineteenth century in England). A black man would be assumed to be a non-Christian, unless proven otherwise.
In 1630, the second judgment, Re Davis, has the defendant being “soundly whipt before an assembly of negroes & others for abusing himself to the dishon[o]r of God and shame of Christianity by defiling his body in lying with a negro.” Higginbotham infers that Hugh Davis is white, because his race is not mentioned. His offense, described as a crime against Christianity, is according to Higginbotham that he slept with a black woman. The whipping in front of “negroes & others” is “especially humiliating, because he would have been debased in front of individuals who were his legal inferiors.”
Higginbotham’s explanation seems strained, in a culture where “a white master had the right to demand sexual compliance of his female slaves, just as surely as he had the right to ride his mares. This practice…was, to be sure, already tolerated in secret as a matter of privilege in 1630.” If, as he says later, Davis was a poor man who would not be entitled to such privileges, would he have felt the humiliation Higginbotham suggests? And in any case, if we’re looking for crimes against Christianity, “abuses” that “defile” a person, isn’t it more likely that Davis (whether black or white) and the “negro” he lay with were both male? Is it just an editor’s slip that has Higginbotham concluding that in the case “the black person’s irredeemable inferiority was measured by his presence as the reason for the white man’s punishment”?
In 1640, another sex case, Re Sweat, has the court whipping a pregnant black woman and forcing the white father to do “public penance for his offence at James city church.” Higginbotham says the judgment focuses on humiliation rather than compensation to the woman’s owner for the fact that “during the pregnancy and post-childbirth period, she probably became less valuable,” completely ignoring that since no mention is made of the child, the slave woman’s owner apparently gets to keep her (assuming she survives the whipping). Higginbotham is so convinced of the shame of sleeping with a black woman, that to him the meaningless slap on the wrist of “penance” is worse than the “monetary damages” Sweat wasn’t forced to pay.
The final case, In Re Graweere, describes how John Graweere, a black slave, bought his son’s freedom from the mother’s owner. When John’s owner made a claim, on the basis of his ownership of the father, the court ruled in John’s favor and freed the son. Higginbotham says the decision turned on John’s promise that the boy “would be made a Christian and be taught and exercised in the church of England.” The court declared “the child shall be free…to be and remain at the disposing and education of the said Graweere and the child’s godfather who undertaketh to see it brought up in the Christian religion as aforesaid.”
Higginbotham says “this case is correctly interpreted as significant evidence that, by 1641, the legal process had not contemplated the institution of hereditary slavery.” But if this is the case, why was it necessary for John Graweere to buy his son away from the boy’s owner? Higginbotham deduces that Graweere is probably not a Christian himself, which seems reasonable. But then he jumps to the conclusion that the godfather mentioned in the judgment must be white. Wouldn’t it be reasonable, if the father was non-Christian, for the court to be interested in the Christian godfather’s role in training the boy? Wouldn’t it be likely, if Higginbotham’s claims are correct and racism is creeping into the picture, that something as unusual as a white godfather promising to train a freed slave boy, might be mentioned more explicitly?
Higginbotham claims that “if the precept of black inferiority meant anything, it certainly meant that, in the court’s estimation, the child’s Christian education would have been better safeguarded if entrusted to the care of a white colonist than if placed in the hands of a black servant, Christian or otherwise.” It seems less of a strain to conclude that “the precept of black inferiority” actually didn’t mean anything, in this time and place. Higginbotham also claims that if a black godfather could insure the boy’s Christianity, then blacks would have converted “en masse” and petitioned the court for their freedom. He forgets that John Graweere had bought his son’s freedom, and the court was simply protecting him from a claim that would have undermined property conventions that were, contrary to Higginbotham’s claim, moving towards institutionalizing hereditary slavery.
Higginbotham finds racism in these accounts, and maybe it’s there. But the language of the judgments suggests the court was at least as concerned about religion. In the final case, he says large numbers of blacks would convert in order to improve their circumstances. Passing over his mistaken equation of Christianity with freedom, it does seem that Christian blacks enjoyed privileges and status denied to the unconverted. So, why didn’t more blacks become Christians?
Higginbotham says the sexual crimes were dealt with harshly because the two white men involved were “poor whites or servants who had managed to sleep with black women.” If this was the case, why did one court decision carefully record the black person’s owner, while the other made no mention of it? While it does seem reasonable to think the authorities may have wanted to minimize fraternization between potentially rebellious black and white populations, was rebellion even an issue at the time of these cases?
If we take a cue from Higginbotham, and assume the cases in court records tell us something about what’s going on in society, what do these cases suggest? Certainly, that there was a lot of sex happening, that religious and civil authorities wanted to prevent. Maybe that some of this illicit sex was leading to pairings (marriages, families, domestic alliances) that circumvented normal social channels and the controls of proper marriage, inheritance, and even property rights (if we conclude, contrary to Higginbotham, that the whites were already institutionalizing permanent, hereditary slavery). In each of the cases, Christianity is at least as visible a factor as race, and the blacks’ status as non-Christians is central to the problem. Maybe the hidden social issue was that there was something in black culture that prevented slaves from becoming Christian to improve their social status. A cultural element that gave them something more valuable, which they weren’t willing to turn their backs on. Just the type of thing you’d want to eliminate, if you were planning to establish lifelong, hereditary slavery.
Teaching Kids History
08/26/2009 16:47
The subtitle of this award-winning volume of essays, promises to chart the future of teaching the past. Wineburg’s main point, that the “historical thinking” and close, critical reading practiced by professional historians are very different from the ways students in other fields (and high school students, even in history classes) are taught to read and think. This is a valuable insight, which historians who write for the public (and grad students) would benefit from pondering. Wineburg’s essays, gathered from a decade of articles, conference papers and informal presentations, open a new field of study and outline a number of questions that he and others have begun trying to answer.
Wineburg begins by observing that standardized testing doesn’t provide an accurate picture of students’ historical knowledge, partly because of the testers’ focus on data and facts. He suggests that a wider exploration might explore the “cultural pores” through which students (and the general public) acquire historical understanding, “make meaning…[and] situate their own personal histories in the context of national and world history.” Wineburg places the debate over history at the center of the American culture wars, complete with Lynne Cheney at the head of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and candidate Bob Dole calling his opponents in the national standards debate “worse than external enemies” of America. Given the nastiness of the debate over what should and shouldn’t be taught, “some might wonder why history was ever considered part of the humanities…that are supposed to teach us to spurn sloganeering, tolerate complexity, and cherish nuance.” Wineburg’s claim is that history is mind-expanding and humanizing, but only if we learn to think like historians.
Historical thinking, Wineburg says, “goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think.” Wineburg observed high school students, and found that even those with well-developed reading skills “shaped the information [they] encountered so that the new conformed to the shape of the already known.” He compares the naïve high-schooler’s approach to Collingwood’s belief “that we can somehow ‘know Caesar’ because human ways of thought, in some deep and essential way, transcend time and space.”
Against this “classic historicist stance,” Wineburg argues with Carlo Ginzburg that the historian’s task is to “destroy our false sense of proximity to people of the past…The morte we discover about these people’s mental universes, the more we should be shocked by the cultural distance that separates us from them.” The Egyptians, Wineburg concludes, “drew differently because they saw differently.”
This is familiar territory to academic historians, who delight in the tension between the two extremes of “classical” objectivity and “post-modern” subjectivity – and generally live somewhere in between. Wineburg, of course, is writing primarily for social studies teachers and educational administrators. The part that may be new and shocking to professional historians is how their nuanced, qualified descriptions of the past change as they enter the high school classroom. Textbooks, Wineburg says, “pivot on what Roland Barthes called the ‘referential illusion,’ the notion that the way things are told is simply the way things were.” Textbooks eliminate “metadiscourse…places in the text where the author intrudes to indicate positionality and stance.” They generally speak in the omniscient third person, suggesting that they’re presenting “just the facts, ma’am,” and that there’s one correct interpretation and it’s the one they’ve presented. Metadiscourse, Wineburg says, indicates an author’s “judgment, emphasis, and uncertainty.” Historians “rely heavily on ‘hedges’ to indicate indeterminacy, using such devices…to convey the uncertainty of historical knowledge.” Textbooks don’t.
This approach to teaching the past, Wineburg suggests, leaves students unaware that for actual historians, the past is substantially more mysterious and their understanding of it more tentative and contingent – and as a result much more interesting than the textbooks. Students are left with a “presentist” point of view, and come to see concepts like prejudice, tolerance, racism, fairness, and equity “as transcendent truths soaring above time and place,” rather than as “patterns of thought that take root in particular historical moments.” As a result of current methods, Wineburg says, students (and some teachers) don’t know what to make of figures like Abraham Lincoln, whose attitudes toward black people don’t fit those of the twenty-first century.
The two main elements of “historical thinking” for Wineburg seem to be subtext and context. General readers mine texts for data points, he says, while historians are aware of the text as both “a rhetorical artifact and…as a human artifact.” To the historian, “texts emerge as speech acts,” subject to “the same set of concepts we use to decipher human action.” Furthermore, historians are rarely the intended audience of the documents they study, so “as eavesdroppers on conversations between others, [they] must try to understand both the authors’ intentions and the audiences’ reactions” to the text. In contrast, students and their teachers too often looked for “straight information,” and “failed to see the text as a social instrument skillfully crafted to achieve a social end.”
Having laid out this argument, Wineburg presents a series of studies he’s performed over the years. He shows bright, articulate high school students failing to understand the context of primary documents, while historians examine the sources of statements as closely as the statements themselves. In one ironic passage, a student-teacher who majored in history as an undergraduate is less able to pull back from the text, than a former physics major (suggesting perhaps a difference in the way these people learned about paradigms and the contingency of knowledge?). Finally, in a concluding essay, Wineburg makes some interesting points about lived and learned memory, and observes wryly that “family” experience of history has largely devolved into jumping onto the couch together and popping in a Spielberg video.
Historical Thinking, like most field-establishing texts, opens more doors than it closes. Clearly there’s a lot left to do, if the goal is to teach secondary educators and high school students how to think more like historians. Wineburg has outlined the problem, and has made a convincing case that “historical thinking” could lead to greater “intellectual charity.” How to implement solutions, and how critical thinking in history is different from and superior to critical thinking in other fields, are questions that still need to be explored. The promise of “charting the future of teaching the past” is not fulfilled in this volume – but maybe we now have some ideas about where to look.
Indians
08/25/2009 16:32
Chapter Three of this historiography textbook begins with an enigmatic quote: “’I am an Indian,’ wrote Virginia planter-historian Robert Beverley in his 1705 preface to his The History and the Present State of Virginia.” The authors suggest Beverley’s identification with “Indianness” highlights “some of the unique problems in attempting to track the historiography of American Indians.” But the sample readings they provide show how far the study of native cultures and their encounter with “America” still has to go.
“Historians of Indians,” the authors say, bring not only their “political agendas...[but] their personal desires, identifications, and hatreds” to the study. In their chapter introduction, they mention a number of writers who’ve criticized the colonists’ treatment of the natives, beginning with “Bartholeme de Las Casas…The Devastation of the Indies in 1552.” They quote Puritan leader Cotton Mather’s celebration of the plague that wiped out “Nineteen of Twenty” people among the tribes near Plymouth prior to the Mayflower’s arrival, “so that the Woods were almost cleared of those pernicious Creatures, to make Room for better Growth.” (Mather’s italics) Also quoted is John Underhill’s conviction that “Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents…We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”
These are insane statements, which go a long way toward either undermining the reader’s belief that colonial leaders were actually religious people. Or to confirming a suspicion that the religion they professed was imperial, white-supremecist, and in the end, all about power and domination.
That’s why it’s so surprising to me that the two passages included, about the new perspectives on Indian history, are both so deeply committed to exploring Indian culture’s response to America solely from the perspective of religion. Colin Calloway begins by saying that “in the eyes of the Christian invaders, Indians had no real religion.” But would finding a pious, recognizably religious (even a Christian) native community have changed their actions? Or are we right to “question the missionaries’ assumptions, finding their arrogance repellent and despising them as agents of cultural genocide” (they were agents of actual, not cultural genocide)? And if “Christianity was a weapon of conquest, not a path to salvation,” is the Indians’ relationship with colonial religion the most valuable cross-cultural element to explore?
Calloway gives nearly all his attention in this selection to Indian adoption of (or adaptation of) Christianity. Some tribes, he says, found common ground between the missionaries’ teaching and their old beliefs. Some treated the “Christian saints…[and] Franciscans…as additional shamans.” Others, finding the French wouldn’t sell guns to non-Christians, “accepted baptism to secure firearms.”
If some Indian women converted in order to learn to spin wool or to read, and some men joined for weapons, it seems to me that the things they learned and got (spinning, reading, guns) are at least as relevant as the theology they embraced. There are so many points of contact between the natives and the colonists, it seems like there would be other, more interesting dimensions to the interplay and resulting cultural change. Trade, technology transfer, farming, travel, buying and selling land, fighting – not to mention all the cultural elements (ethical, economic, philosophical, political, scientific, and even household knowledge and fashion) that aren’t part of the catechism – all seem more vital to understanding the Indian encounter with the white man than how natives reacted to white religion.
Religion seems to me most relevant to the ongoing relationship between the Indians and whites, not in how the Indians reacted to it, but in how the whites used it. Whether in the sense of “Spanish missionaries [who] regarded resettling Indian people as peasants…as a prerequisite of Christianity,” or in the more passive sense of using religious communities (that “resorted to whipping, branding, and solitary confinement to keep the Indians on the path to ‘civilization and salvation’”) to sweep together the refugees of villages wiped out by white diseases, it’s the colonists’ use or abuse of religion that’s really relevant. Or their refusal to engage when it suited them, as when “in 1782, American militiamen butchered ninety-six pacifist and unarmed Morovian [Christian] Indians in their village at Gnadenhütten.”
The most interesting element of the Indian response to Christianity might be Calloway’s brief mention (quoting Axtell) that some “Indians ensured the survival of native culture by taking on the protective coloration of the invaders’ culture.” They appeared to convert, while secretly “giving traditional meanings to Christian rites, dogmas, and deities.” They learned from their conquerors that the religion was an empty vessel that could be filled with anything at all, so they hid their culture in the last place whites would look for it.
Gregory Evans Dowd, like Calloway, seems to put religion at the center of his study of the Indian response to invasion. In Dowd’s case, native spirituality is the vehicle for a prophetic nativist resistance to continuing white encroachment. This quasi-religious movement was challenged by (presumably Christian or secular) Indian groups who favored accommodation.
In this excerpt (hopefully not in the book it came from, nor in the author’s complete body of work), the emphasis on religion is (slightly) less of a problem than Dowd’s formulation of these two groups, the nativists and the accomodationists. Although Dowd allows that “Militant religion [was] in somewhat of a hiatus during those years,” he insists that religion “provided and continued to extend the intertribal network upon which unity depended.” Citing the “intertribal, even diplomatic character of prophecy,” Dowd argues that militant networks possessed a “shared symbolic lexicon.” He implies that this was the only symbol system shared among the far-flung, linguistically distinct tribes of North America.
But this is exactly the point that argues against the other side of Dowd’s formula. There was no “Indian” national consciousness. “The heritage of Indian diversity and of highly localized, familial, and ethnically oriented government” made it extremely difficult for many Indians to join the artificial, newly-created “nativist” Indian nation. Those “Indians who identified with ‘tribal’ leaders” can’t simply be lumped together and written off as “advocates of accommodation.” And the nativist prophets’ use of language and symbols seemingly borrowed from their enemies’ religion cannot have made matters any easier for the dissenters.
When “prophets and shamans…accused them of the neglect of ritual and warned of an impending doom,” skeptical listeners may have examined their own local experience against the prophets’ generalized complaints. Were they neglecting the rituals? Did they believe in a vengeful, angry God? Thoughtful Indians might have noticed that accusations that “they had failed in their commitments to the sacred powers,” and that they must “kill witches…to purify themselves,” had a remarkable resonance with the New England Christianity of the recent past. And the emphasis on “the Great Spirit, the remote Creator who became increasingly important, probably under the influence of Christianity,” probably raised some doubts in the minds of tribes intent on preserving their own local traditions in the face of American encroachment.
Given ongoing American aggression that impacted resisters and appeasers alike, a united, continent-wide Indian resistance was a reasonable response. But, notwithstanding the efforts of Neolin, Tenskwatawa and others, basing the nativist case for unity on a vaguely Christian-sounding religious appeal seems like it was a bad idea. In the end, this selection leaves me wondering if, in fact, there were other bases for Indian unity, and to what extent they may have been tried. Restricting the conversation to the religious sphere may have been the Indians’ great mistake. At least in the way we think of religion. If we widen the scope of the idea, to encompass all (or nearly all) of Indian life, then the Indians’ actions make more sense. But then we’re talking about apples and oranges, and the argument presented in this excerpt needs much wider and deeper elaboration.
Puritans
08/24/2009 17:56
The Puritans: The basic claim seems to be that Puritanism is one of the main sources of American Exceptionalism, and possibly of the American character in the colonial and early national periods. Perry Miller and Thomas Johnson talk about “traits which have persisted long after the vanishing of the original creed.” But then, in distinguishing between “authentic Puritanism” and what its descendents (evangelism and universalism) retained of its elements, they immediately call into question whether the traits which persisted were peculiarly Puritan, or part of the underlying culture.
“Puritanism,” they say, “has not been sustained by any denomination stemming from it.” It is a distinct and different thing, which would repudiate the new lights as enthusiasts and the universalists as materialists. So what were they, and more importantly, why do they matter?
Miller and Johnson make the insightful (and widely applicable) point that “notwithstanding the depth of this divergence [between the Puritans and the English Church], the fact still remains that only certain specific questions were raised.” It’s possible to be bitter opponents, and be very much alike. In fact, “the vast majority [of] ideas held by New England Puritans…were precisely those of their opponents…about 90 percent of the intellectual life, scientific knowledge, morality, manners and customs, notions and prejudices” that made up Puritan culture, were those “of all Englishmen.”
Certainly, it was on the other ten percent that the Puritans defined themselves, when they set out to remove themselves from England and set up their own society in the New World. But just because they did this, are we obligated to agree with them? In fact, when they were NOT addressing the rationale behind their emigration, were these differences with their old neighbors and relatives in England really the guiding principles of life for the New England Puritans?
Miller and Johnson point out that when historians try to “trace developments and influences on subsequent American history and thought, we shall find that the starting point…is as apt to be found among the 90 percent as among the 10. So again, if this is the case, how do we justify our acceptance of the 10% as the guiding lights in the daily lives of all the people who lived in Massachusetts Bay?
The situation is complicated if you’re not a Christian, and as a result don’t appreciate the subtleties of the theological differences that made up this putatively critical 10%. Yes, you can appreciate that they may have felt very strongly about issues you consider trivial. But the question remains, why are these differences historically significant? The answer, for the unbeliever, would have to be found in the different actions these rival theologies inspired.
Miller and Johnson admit that, to a large extent, the “conflict between the Puritans and the Churchmen was…a debate among pundits.” The question remains, how much was this debate relevant to the non-pundits? In what ways did the people of Massachusetts Bay participate in the debate? How did it affect their lives?
Puritan doctrines held the seeds of their own undoing – or at least of challenges like the Antinomianism of Anne Hutchinson. Miller and Johnson describe the Puritan leaders’ attempts to control these excesses, which seem like nothing more than the logical conclusions of their differences with the English Churchmen. In this sense, the Puritans appear hypocritical; unwilling to consistently and completely apply the ideals they profess.
“New England theocracy,” Miller and Johnson say, “was thoroughly medieval in character.” But again, was this due to the 10% that was different, or the 90% that was the same as English religion? Or do the needs of both sects, to propagate and maintain themselves by controlling the beliefs and behavior of their followers, require just such a feudal social order?
“In America,” they continue,” “the frontier conspired with the popular disposition to lessen the prestige of the cultured classes” and the church hierarchy. Isn’t this another way of saying that the urban elites and Puritan divines had little to offer that could lessen the struggles or enhance the wellbeing of pioneers struggling to survive on the frontiers? “Sermon after sermon reveals that in their eyes the cause of learning and the cause of hierarchical, differentiated social order were one and the same.” That centralized, “higher” learning supported ministerial claims to social dominance. Doesn’t this suggest, by extension, that “New England theocracy” was designed to play the same role?
Seems to me that, far from rehabilitating Puritanism as the leading source of American exceptionalism, Miller and Johnson have called out a number of ways in which the small set of beliefs that set the Puritans apart from their theological adversaries are shown to be insignificant, self-contradictory, and possibly irrelevant in the creation of American culture. In the end, isn’t the Puritans’ real contribution, not their eccentric theology (abandoned and misrepresented even by their direct descendants, the new lights and the universalists), but rather their dogged insistence that they were, in fact, exceptional? Isn’t that the basis of the American myth? That we’re special, even when we’re exactly the same?
Philip Gura’s 1984 contribution to the Puritan story suggested more attention should be paid to the radicals like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams who challenged the Puritan authorities. Gura says “in many cases, theirs were the same Protestant principles Winthrop and the others earlier had defended in England yet, under pressure to settle the wilderness and codify their ecclesiology, soon enough condemned as seditious or heretical.” That’s a polite way of saying that when they’d become the establishment, Winthrop and his allies denied the ideas that had formed the basis of their rebellion.
Gura criticizes Miller for “treating the whole literature as though it were the product of a single intelligence,” and thus missing any subtle differences or development over time that might be seen in Puritan documents. He says “Miller viewed New England dissent as a sideshow to the events on the main stage of…intellectual and social history.”
Looking at town and church records, Gura claims, supports his argument that “Heterogeneity, not unanimity, actually characterized the colony’s religious life.” However, unlike others who questioned the reach of Puritan ideas across the wider working-class New England population, Gura continues to view New England as an area “settled in the belief that it was to become nothing less than a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.”
Gura’s exclusively theological focus allows him to conclude “what is apparent in the colonists’ elaborate definitions and justifications…and evident in their polemics against dissenters is that the New Englander’s ideological self-image was shaped…by an unyielding effort to neutralize the influence of those who argued for a much more radical reorganization of the society.” Again, this seems like a polite way of saying that, once they had gained power, the Puritans wanted to reinstate centralized authority and eliminate any further dissent or theological elaboration. This rigidity toward those outside the power-group, who may not have realized the reform game was officially over, is what prompted Roger Williams the “monstrous Paradox [that] God’s children should persecute God’s children.” The fact that New England congregationalism “produced supporters as harsh and intolerant as the English prelates” suggests that there really wasn’t that much difference between the Puritans and their adversaries back in England. Theology was an excuse for a power struggle; and was jettisoned as soon as the Puritans obtained the power they sought.
Of the two excerpts presented in the text, it seems Miller and Johnson had a more ironic sense of the narrowness of Puritan thought, and the likelihood that although the Puritans contributed to the myth of American uniqueness, it may not have been through their theology; but rather through their arrogance. Their declaration that they were exceptional, not the theological details of their position, seems to be the key to their contribution. That, and the subsequent consolidation of social and political power that allowed them to dominate New England for more than a century.
Chilean Copper in 1872
08/19/2009 15:20
James Douglas Jr., “The Copper Mines of Chili,” Engineering and Mining Journal 1872.
James Douglas Jr. was the son of a Scottish-born Quebéc physician and member of the Royal College of Surgeons. Born in 1837, Douglas was drawn to study the metallurgy of copper after working at a mine his father owned a share in. In 1869, Douglas and Dr. Thomas Sterry Hunt published the “Hunt and Douglas” process of reducing copper using salt. This process was used successfully in North Carolina and Chile by the early 1870s. In 1871, Douglas apparently traveled to Chile; probably to help establish his extraction process. His account of Chilean copper mining appeared in the April edition of London’s Quarterly Journal of Science and in installments, with “revisions and corrections” in the 1872 E&MJ, beginning with the May 21 issue. In 1881, Douglas began his career at Phelps Dodge by going to Arizona to investigate what became the Copper Queen Mine.
Douglas begins his first installment of the article with a review of Chilean copper mining, acknowledging the fact that “As the produce of the Chili mines now regulates the price of copper all over the world, and all speculation as to its future price must depend on the probable future yield of these mines, their condition is a subject of prime importance to all interested in the copper trade.”
Nearly “all the copper comes,” Douglas says, “from the coast range, and from within 30 miles of the sea; and nearly two-thirds of it from the three great mineral districts of Tomaya, Carrizal, and Chañaral.” A little copper comes from the “Cajon de Maipu,” and the “Condes Mines” in the cordillera “produce 200 tons or so of 23 per cent. ore annually.” Othe cordillera mines are the “Cerro Blanco…a little south of the Copiopó…and the Esploradora mines of Mr. Sievert, in the Atacama Desert, 120 miles inland.” Generally, transportation difficulties and the lack of high-yield deposits prevent mining inland.
Starting in the south, Douglas lists the Chilean mines. South of Santiago, he says, “a number of small mines are worked both in the Cordillera and the coast range; but their total yield falls short of 1,000 tons of fine copper annually.” Is the site of Braden’s find (El Teniente) being worked by small-scale miners?
“Crossing the line of 33 deg. S. latitude,” Douglas mentions “mines on both sides of the Melon Valley and the Catemo and San Felipe mines.” He describes the ores (“The San Felipe ores are of grey sulphides; but as a rule the lodes are narrow.”), indicating that he’s studied them first-hand in some detail. The “Paral mine on one of the Coimas group of lodes, where a lode of a yard wide yields on an average a 30 per cent. ore,” is an exception, but “the mine is very badly worked…twice as many men are employed in pumping as in breaking the ore.” About 3,000 tons a year from this district “is made into regulus and bars at smelting establishments in the Melon and at Catemo. In the San Felipe Valley, Urmeneta and Errasuriz [sic] have attempted to use the peat—which is here abundant—for smelting, but as yet without advantage.” There’s an article in an earlier number of the E&MJ about using peat for fuel in Britain and the US – apparently U&E are up to date on the latest doings.
In Aconcagua and southern Coquimbo provinces, Douglas sees evidence of long and extensive mining. “The hills are so saturated with copper that a desmontes or refuse heap enters as a conspicuous object into almost every bit of mountain scenery, and innumerable slag heaps in many a nook and corner mark the spots where furnaces smelted the ore from neighboring mines till the hill sides, to the serious detriment of agriculture, had been denuded of timber.” Suggests that not only mining but smelting is an old and widely distributed practice. Note it was done with wood, until the local timber was exhausted. And the degree to which it impacted agriculture might shed light on the development of ag policy & adversarial tone of farmers.
“When we reach the river Limari, near Ovalle, we come in sight of the Hill of Tomaya, the most southerly of the great Chili minerales. It is an isolated mountain, some 3 to 4 miles long, whose summit is 3,000 feet above the level of the plain, and 4,200 above the sea.” From a distance, Douglas can see “long white streaks reaching far towards its base, the enormous piles of desmontes, whose total amount probably exceeds 200,000 tons.” Douglas proceeds to give a detailed account of the mountain and its mines. He notes that “There is not a spring of water on the hill, and the mnes are so dry that they do not supply the needs of the establishments.” “A railroad 36 miles long, connects the mines with the coast at Tongoy.”
On the western slope is the lode from which “Mr. Urmeneta commenced amassing the fortune which the Piké mine has helped to swell.” A matter-of-fact reference to the fact – forgotten in later generations—that Urmeneta was a successful miner before the Pique find. Not “el loco del burro.”
Douglas notes that “It is…from this isolated hill that a great proportion of all the Chili copper came from the years 1860 to 1865.” The most productive mine on the hill has always been Pique, “owned by Don José Tomás de Urmeneta, whose perseverance in prosecuting the work upon it during years of heavy expenditure and disappointment has been rewarded by raising him to the highest rank among successful miners, and by enabling him to confer vast benefits on his country; for Urmeneta was the first man to introduce into Chili first-rate hauling and mining machinery.”
The Pique lode is “yellow sulphuret, mixed with quartz, carbonate of lime, and specular iron. The yeld of the lode from wall to wall is from 8 to 10 per cent, and its average size varies from 3 to 6 feet…The greatest riches of the Piké were derived from some enormous stopes at about the 60-fathom level, where the lode expanded to over 20 feet in width, and yielded a purple ore, which, as it came from the mine, averaged 30 to 35 per cent. It is supposed Urmeneta netted in one year at that time from this mine alone $1,100,000.”
Douglas describes Pique in detail, mapping out the underground sections and explaining which levels “have been abandoned to piqueneros or tributers,” and how ore is raised “by means of a Corliss engine and admirable machinery fitted with friction gearing, through three inclined shafts, which attain a depth of 80 fathoms below the end of the adit,” but that the mine’s bottom is 60 fathoms lower, and ore from here “is raised this last 60 fathoms on the backs of apires (or carriers) and by hand winches.”
In 1864, Urmeneta bought an adit on the south flank of the hill, “commenced as far back as 1840 by Don Ramon Lecaros…It was driven but slowly and irregularly until 1864, when Urmeneta bought the work already done, and continued it more vigorously.” Douglas explains how the adit runs beneath a neighboring mine, the Chalaca, also owned by Urmeneta. Pique employs 50 miners, “but a larger number of tributers find employment in the upper workings.” The tributers are productive: of the 1,250 tons taken from the hill daily, “about half comes from the Piké, and of this half may be said to be extracted from the regular workings below the adit level, and half by tributers from the abandoned stopes or by pickers from the refuse heaps.”
Douglas is particularly interested in the machinery used by Urmeneta and others. Pique’s “concentrator” uses “a pair of Huot and Guyler’s beautiful piston hutches [and] twenty English hutches to be worked by hand and twenty by steam.” Most of the mines use a Blake breaker, an the older Pique “establishment” uses Petherick hutches, “but they do not give satisfaction.” “At the Rosario, Mr. Lipkin collects the concentrated stuff on the sieve,” which is a variation on the standard process. Douglas speculates that a Rittinger Pumpseize might work well, and remarks on the Krupps steel jackets used on all the rollers, which “remain in perfect working order after a twelvemonth, neither pitting nor wearing inequally.”
“The desmontes are enormous,” says Douglas. “Those of the Piké are the largest and probably the poorest. They originally yielded from 6 to 7 per cent., but having been picked over four times probably do not now contain over four per cent.” So even then, it was already taken for granted that fortunes could be made from the slag of earlier, less efficient operations. But then, Lambert did this a generation earlier…the point is, it was known by North Americans.
Finally, Douglas addresses the labor issue. “The hands employed in this mineral,” he says, “in every capacity number about 4000. As all ages and sexes work, this represents a population of about 8000. Urmeneta employs about 600, and as many more work on his property as tributers. So, Urmeneta doesn’t own the entire mountain – although he may process all the ore that comes from it… “The rate of wages is for common labor 12 dols. a month and rations, worth 15 cents a day. For miners (native) 18 dols. a month, and rations of 15 cents a day. The same high rates approximately rule throughout all the mining regions of Chili. Cornishmen alone can be trusted with the timbering, and they are even better paid; so that it is evidently a mistake to suppose Chili owes her mining importance to cheapness of labor.” This was the basis of protectionist claims, leading to the tariff act, 1869 (see also)…I’ll need to look into this soon…
Part 2 (May 28 1872):
The next site Douglas describes is the “monster lode of Panulcillo…The Tomaya people say that Providence placed these great deposits almost side by side , that the ores of the one might serve to flux those of the other, but human perversity and English stupidity interfered to frustrate the kind intention.” The old smelter at the mouth of the mine was replaced in 1870 by a new establishment at “the railroad terminus in the valley…[and] consists of ten large reverberatories, and four blast furnaces, erected last year by Charles Lambert, jun.” The mine “is the only property in Chili worked by an English Joint Stock Company with an office in England…with Mr. Heatley in Valparaiso, and Mr. Wier at the mine, and a good price for copper, the enterprise ought to take a new lease on life.”
“A branch of the Coquimbo and Ovalle Railroad terminates near the smelting works.” It used to carry large cargoes from “Las Cardas, Cerillos, Tambillos, Andacolla,” but they have all dried up. The next large mine is “the Brillador, belonging to Charles Lambert.” Only three miles from the “northern sweep of the Bay of Coquimbo…[it was] more extensively worked than any other mine in the Indian and Spanish periods…Stone and copper hammers are still turned up in the refuse heaps…identical…with those from the Indian workings in the Lake Superior mines.” The vein was still productive in modern times. “Mr. Lambert, in 1847, is reported to have made $1,000,000 profit” at Brillador.
Part 3 (June 4 1872):
“The Panteon Mine, at about a mle distant, once yielded handsomely…the old desmontes of the Panteon supply the furnaces of the Compañia (Mr. Lambert’s Works, near Serena)…[and] the old Spanish slag heaps are still overhauled. Mr. Lambert built the first reverberatory furnace in Chili, and first smelted sulphuretted ores, which previously had been thrown aside as unserviceable.”
Further “north of Serena is the mineral of Higuera…smelted at the mines on the coast at the port of Totoralillos.” Crossing into Atacama, Douglas describes “the mineral of San Juan…now worked by Messrs. Harker and Dickson, at Lebrar.” The next mineral, Carrizal, “about six leagues in a straight line from the coast, has always been known to exist, but has been worked vigorously only within the last fifteen years…[it] now sends almost as much ore to market as the hill of Tomaya.” The six main mines, “Mondaca, Remolinos, Portazela or Banzanillo Alto, Tora, Cantado, and Santa Rita” yield “monthly about 4000 tons of 13 per cent. ore.” Partly because they’re newer, these mines are “admirably worked…thanks to the wisdom of the principal owner, Don Ramon Ovalle, and to the skill of the manager, Mr. McAuliff.”
Part 4 (June 18 1872):
Douglas describes the “Portazuela and Bazanillo Alto, owned by Messrs. Gonzales and Templeman.” He mentions that “the loss in picking, when the ore is broken by a Blake, exceeds that incurred when hand labor is employed; hence the tributers refuse to use it.” The mines along the Copiapó River, similarly, suffer from a lack of water for processing the ore. Labor, technology, transportation, and local resources like water and food are all variables in determining whether a mine can be successful at any given time and place.
Douglas mentions Caleta de las Animas, the port from which “the first shipment of copper from Chili is said by Dr. Philippi to have been made to Europe, in a whaler, in the year 1820. It came from the mines of Las Animas, shortly before discovered by Don Diego de Almeida.” The northern mines send their ore partly to “Mr. Sievert’s establishment at Pan de Azucar, and partly…south” to Lota. Most of the mines are small and remote, in soms cases sending their ore “on mule-back 70 leagues to Tagna, and thence by rail to Arica.”
Douglas sums up the production of these various regions, and discusses their prospects of continuing their current annual output of 48,000 tons of copper. He notes that many of the smaller mines and tributers in large mines will be affected by rising wages. “The Chili peon can get one dollar a day on the Peruvian railroads, and will therefore no longer work at home for 25 cents…Though the yield from each may be insignificant, their total production is by no means trifling. A great deal of copper smelted at Guayacan and the Copiapó establishments is bought in small parcels of a few cwts. each.” The loss of small producers might be partly offset by new technology for extracting low-grade ores, including the Hunt and Douglas method, being attempted “near Tiltil…nder the management of Mr. Waring, one of the best mechanical and mining engineers in Chili.” The Carlos Riesco mine?
Part 5 (June 25 1872):
All the great minerales are likely to diminish, Douglas concludes. “Tomaya will doubtless produce less…Panulcillo sails so close to the wind that if copper falls it will inevitably fail…No doubt Brillador could yield more…Carrizal…has seen its best days.” A few mines, like “Chañaral, now that it has a railroad, may be expected to increase its yield.” But discoveries of new lodes are unlikely. “A copper lode in a desert country cannot escape detection, more especially in Chili, where all the inhabitants are directly or indirectly interested in mines…All the great lodes now worked, except, perhaps, those of the Salado and others in the Atacama desert, have been known and worked from time immemorial.”
But Chili will make up for some of the coming decline by processing its own ore. “Twenty-five years ago,” Douglas says, “very little copper was smelted in Chili; whereas, in 1870, only 3.16 per cent. was exported as ore, while 55.35 per cent. was exported as bars and ingots, and 41.48 per cent. as regulus.”
“Mr. Lambert…erected the first reverberatory furnace in Chili about the year 1837…[and] “the Mexican and South American Smelting Company…run from 1848 to 1857…benefited Chili by introducing Napier’s method…There are throughout Chili about ninety furnaces making regulus, and about sixty calciners and furnaces making bars and ingots.” The two largest establishments are at Lotan and Guayacan. “The former is owned by a company, which likewise owns and works some coal beds in the neighborhood (Mattias Cousino, Concepción)…The Guayacan works, on the Bay of Herradura are owned by Messrs. Urmeneta and Errasuriz [sic], and are among the largest in the world, running ordinarily seventeen triple hearth calcining furnaces, thirteen smelting reverberatories, and two refining furnaces…The same proprietors have furnaces at Cerillos, at the foot of the Tomaya hill…and other works at Tongoi, the port of Tomaya.” Across the Bay in Coquimbo are “the abandoned smelting works of Charles Lambert and of Don Ramon Ovalle and Co., and the active works of Edwards and Co., where such care is taken in the selection and smelting that their bars and ingots bring a better price in the English market than those of either Lota or Guayacan.”
Douglas begins his first installment of the article with a review of Chilean copper mining, acknowledging the fact that “As the produce of the Chili mines now regulates the price of copper all over the world, and all speculation as to its future price must depend on the probable future yield of these mines, their condition is a subject of prime importance to all interested in the copper trade.”
Nearly “all the copper comes,” Douglas says, “from the coast range, and from within 30 miles of the sea; and nearly two-thirds of it from the three great mineral districts of Tomaya, Carrizal, and Chañaral.” A little copper comes from the “Cajon de Maipu,” and the “Condes Mines” in the cordillera “produce 200 tons or so of 23 per cent. ore annually.” Othe cordillera mines are the “Cerro Blanco…a little south of the Copiopó…and the Esploradora mines of Mr. Sievert, in the Atacama Desert, 120 miles inland.” Generally, transportation difficulties and the lack of high-yield deposits prevent mining inland.
Starting in the south, Douglas lists the Chilean mines. South of Santiago, he says, “a number of small mines are worked both in the Cordillera and the coast range; but their total yield falls short of 1,000 tons of fine copper annually.” Is the site of Braden’s find (El Teniente) being worked by small-scale miners?
“Crossing the line of 33 deg. S. latitude,” Douglas mentions “mines on both sides of the Melon Valley and the Catemo and San Felipe mines.” He describes the ores (“The San Felipe ores are of grey sulphides; but as a rule the lodes are narrow.”), indicating that he’s studied them first-hand in some detail. The “Paral mine on one of the Coimas group of lodes, where a lode of a yard wide yields on an average a 30 per cent. ore,” is an exception, but “the mine is very badly worked…twice as many men are employed in pumping as in breaking the ore.” About 3,000 tons a year from this district “is made into regulus and bars at smelting establishments in the Melon and at Catemo. In the San Felipe Valley, Urmeneta and Errasuriz [sic] have attempted to use the peat—which is here abundant—for smelting, but as yet without advantage.” There’s an article in an earlier number of the E&MJ about using peat for fuel in Britain and the US – apparently U&E are up to date on the latest doings.
In Aconcagua and southern Coquimbo provinces, Douglas sees evidence of long and extensive mining. “The hills are so saturated with copper that a desmontes or refuse heap enters as a conspicuous object into almost every bit of mountain scenery, and innumerable slag heaps in many a nook and corner mark the spots where furnaces smelted the ore from neighboring mines till the hill sides, to the serious detriment of agriculture, had been denuded of timber.” Suggests that not only mining but smelting is an old and widely distributed practice. Note it was done with wood, until the local timber was exhausted. And the degree to which it impacted agriculture might shed light on the development of ag policy & adversarial tone of farmers.
“When we reach the river Limari, near Ovalle, we come in sight of the Hill of Tomaya, the most southerly of the great Chili minerales. It is an isolated mountain, some 3 to 4 miles long, whose summit is 3,000 feet above the level of the plain, and 4,200 above the sea.” From a distance, Douglas can see “long white streaks reaching far towards its base, the enormous piles of desmontes, whose total amount probably exceeds 200,000 tons.” Douglas proceeds to give a detailed account of the mountain and its mines. He notes that “There is not a spring of water on the hill, and the mnes are so dry that they do not supply the needs of the establishments.” “A railroad 36 miles long, connects the mines with the coast at Tongoy.”
On the western slope is the lode from which “Mr. Urmeneta commenced amassing the fortune which the Piké mine has helped to swell.” A matter-of-fact reference to the fact – forgotten in later generations—that Urmeneta was a successful miner before the Pique find. Not “el loco del burro.”
Douglas notes that “It is…from this isolated hill that a great proportion of all the Chili copper came from the years 1860 to 1865.” The most productive mine on the hill has always been Pique, “owned by Don José Tomás de Urmeneta, whose perseverance in prosecuting the work upon it during years of heavy expenditure and disappointment has been rewarded by raising him to the highest rank among successful miners, and by enabling him to confer vast benefits on his country; for Urmeneta was the first man to introduce into Chili first-rate hauling and mining machinery.”
The Pique lode is “yellow sulphuret, mixed with quartz, carbonate of lime, and specular iron. The yeld of the lode from wall to wall is from 8 to 10 per cent, and its average size varies from 3 to 6 feet…The greatest riches of the Piké were derived from some enormous stopes at about the 60-fathom level, where the lode expanded to over 20 feet in width, and yielded a purple ore, which, as it came from the mine, averaged 30 to 35 per cent. It is supposed Urmeneta netted in one year at that time from this mine alone $1,100,000.”
Douglas describes Pique in detail, mapping out the underground sections and explaining which levels “have been abandoned to piqueneros or tributers,” and how ore is raised “by means of a Corliss engine and admirable machinery fitted with friction gearing, through three inclined shafts, which attain a depth of 80 fathoms below the end of the adit,” but that the mine’s bottom is 60 fathoms lower, and ore from here “is raised this last 60 fathoms on the backs of apires (or carriers) and by hand winches.”
In 1864, Urmeneta bought an adit on the south flank of the hill, “commenced as far back as 1840 by Don Ramon Lecaros…It was driven but slowly and irregularly until 1864, when Urmeneta bought the work already done, and continued it more vigorously.” Douglas explains how the adit runs beneath a neighboring mine, the Chalaca, also owned by Urmeneta. Pique employs 50 miners, “but a larger number of tributers find employment in the upper workings.” The tributers are productive: of the 1,250 tons taken from the hill daily, “about half comes from the Piké, and of this half may be said to be extracted from the regular workings below the adit level, and half by tributers from the abandoned stopes or by pickers from the refuse heaps.”
Douglas is particularly interested in the machinery used by Urmeneta and others. Pique’s “concentrator” uses “a pair of Huot and Guyler’s beautiful piston hutches [and] twenty English hutches to be worked by hand and twenty by steam.” Most of the mines use a Blake breaker, an the older Pique “establishment” uses Petherick hutches, “but they do not give satisfaction.” “At the Rosario, Mr. Lipkin collects the concentrated stuff on the sieve,” which is a variation on the standard process. Douglas speculates that a Rittinger Pumpseize might work well, and remarks on the Krupps steel jackets used on all the rollers, which “remain in perfect working order after a twelvemonth, neither pitting nor wearing inequally.”
“The desmontes are enormous,” says Douglas. “Those of the Piké are the largest and probably the poorest. They originally yielded from 6 to 7 per cent., but having been picked over four times probably do not now contain over four per cent.” So even then, it was already taken for granted that fortunes could be made from the slag of earlier, less efficient operations. But then, Lambert did this a generation earlier…the point is, it was known by North Americans.
Finally, Douglas addresses the labor issue. “The hands employed in this mineral,” he says, “in every capacity number about 4000. As all ages and sexes work, this represents a population of about 8000. Urmeneta employs about 600, and as many more work on his property as tributers. So, Urmeneta doesn’t own the entire mountain – although he may process all the ore that comes from it… “The rate of wages is for common labor 12 dols. a month and rations, worth 15 cents a day. For miners (native) 18 dols. a month, and rations of 15 cents a day. The same high rates approximately rule throughout all the mining regions of Chili. Cornishmen alone can be trusted with the timbering, and they are even better paid; so that it is evidently a mistake to suppose Chili owes her mining importance to cheapness of labor.” This was the basis of protectionist claims, leading to the tariff act, 1869 (see also)…I’ll need to look into this soon…
Part 2 (May 28 1872):
The next site Douglas describes is the “monster lode of Panulcillo…The Tomaya people say that Providence placed these great deposits almost side by side , that the ores of the one might serve to flux those of the other, but human perversity and English stupidity interfered to frustrate the kind intention.” The old smelter at the mouth of the mine was replaced in 1870 by a new establishment at “the railroad terminus in the valley…[and] consists of ten large reverberatories, and four blast furnaces, erected last year by Charles Lambert, jun.” The mine “is the only property in Chili worked by an English Joint Stock Company with an office in England…with Mr. Heatley in Valparaiso, and Mr. Wier at the mine, and a good price for copper, the enterprise ought to take a new lease on life.”
“A branch of the Coquimbo and Ovalle Railroad terminates near the smelting works.” It used to carry large cargoes from “Las Cardas, Cerillos, Tambillos, Andacolla,” but they have all dried up. The next large mine is “the Brillador, belonging to Charles Lambert.” Only three miles from the “northern sweep of the Bay of Coquimbo…[it was] more extensively worked than any other mine in the Indian and Spanish periods…Stone and copper hammers are still turned up in the refuse heaps…identical…with those from the Indian workings in the Lake Superior mines.” The vein was still productive in modern times. “Mr. Lambert, in 1847, is reported to have made $1,000,000 profit” at Brillador.
Part 3 (June 4 1872):
“The Panteon Mine, at about a mle distant, once yielded handsomely…the old desmontes of the Panteon supply the furnaces of the Compañia (Mr. Lambert’s Works, near Serena)…[and] the old Spanish slag heaps are still overhauled. Mr. Lambert built the first reverberatory furnace in Chili, and first smelted sulphuretted ores, which previously had been thrown aside as unserviceable.”
Further “north of Serena is the mineral of Higuera…smelted at the mines on the coast at the port of Totoralillos.” Crossing into Atacama, Douglas describes “the mineral of San Juan…now worked by Messrs. Harker and Dickson, at Lebrar.” The next mineral, Carrizal, “about six leagues in a straight line from the coast, has always been known to exist, but has been worked vigorously only within the last fifteen years…[it] now sends almost as much ore to market as the hill of Tomaya.” The six main mines, “Mondaca, Remolinos, Portazela or Banzanillo Alto, Tora, Cantado, and Santa Rita” yield “monthly about 4000 tons of 13 per cent. ore.” Partly because they’re newer, these mines are “admirably worked…thanks to the wisdom of the principal owner, Don Ramon Ovalle, and to the skill of the manager, Mr. McAuliff.”
Part 4 (June 18 1872):
Douglas describes the “Portazuela and Bazanillo Alto, owned by Messrs. Gonzales and Templeman.” He mentions that “the loss in picking, when the ore is broken by a Blake, exceeds that incurred when hand labor is employed; hence the tributers refuse to use it.” The mines along the Copiapó River, similarly, suffer from a lack of water for processing the ore. Labor, technology, transportation, and local resources like water and food are all variables in determining whether a mine can be successful at any given time and place.
Douglas mentions Caleta de las Animas, the port from which “the first shipment of copper from Chili is said by Dr. Philippi to have been made to Europe, in a whaler, in the year 1820. It came from the mines of Las Animas, shortly before discovered by Don Diego de Almeida.” The northern mines send their ore partly to “Mr. Sievert’s establishment at Pan de Azucar, and partly…south” to Lota. Most of the mines are small and remote, in soms cases sending their ore “on mule-back 70 leagues to Tagna, and thence by rail to Arica.”
Douglas sums up the production of these various regions, and discusses their prospects of continuing their current annual output of 48,000 tons of copper. He notes that many of the smaller mines and tributers in large mines will be affected by rising wages. “The Chili peon can get one dollar a day on the Peruvian railroads, and will therefore no longer work at home for 25 cents…Though the yield from each may be insignificant, their total production is by no means trifling. A great deal of copper smelted at Guayacan and the Copiapó establishments is bought in small parcels of a few cwts. each.” The loss of small producers might be partly offset by new technology for extracting low-grade ores, including the Hunt and Douglas method, being attempted “near Tiltil…nder the management of Mr. Waring, one of the best mechanical and mining engineers in Chili.” The Carlos Riesco mine?
Part 5 (June 25 1872):
All the great minerales are likely to diminish, Douglas concludes. “Tomaya will doubtless produce less…Panulcillo sails so close to the wind that if copper falls it will inevitably fail…No doubt Brillador could yield more…Carrizal…has seen its best days.” A few mines, like “Chañaral, now that it has a railroad, may be expected to increase its yield.” But discoveries of new lodes are unlikely. “A copper lode in a desert country cannot escape detection, more especially in Chili, where all the inhabitants are directly or indirectly interested in mines…All the great lodes now worked, except, perhaps, those of the Salado and others in the Atacama desert, have been known and worked from time immemorial.”
But Chili will make up for some of the coming decline by processing its own ore. “Twenty-five years ago,” Douglas says, “very little copper was smelted in Chili; whereas, in 1870, only 3.16 per cent. was exported as ore, while 55.35 per cent. was exported as bars and ingots, and 41.48 per cent. as regulus.”
“Mr. Lambert…erected the first reverberatory furnace in Chili about the year 1837…[and] “the Mexican and South American Smelting Company…run from 1848 to 1857…benefited Chili by introducing Napier’s method…There are throughout Chili about ninety furnaces making regulus, and about sixty calciners and furnaces making bars and ingots.” The two largest establishments are at Lotan and Guayacan. “The former is owned by a company, which likewise owns and works some coal beds in the neighborhood (Mattias Cousino, Concepción)…The Guayacan works, on the Bay of Herradura are owned by Messrs. Urmeneta and Errasuriz [sic], and are among the largest in the world, running ordinarily seventeen triple hearth calcining furnaces, thirteen smelting reverberatories, and two refining furnaces…The same proprietors have furnaces at Cerillos, at the foot of the Tomaya hill…and other works at Tongoi, the port of Tomaya.” Across the Bay in Coquimbo are “the abandoned smelting works of Charles Lambert and of Don Ramon Ovalle and Co., and the active works of Edwards and Co., where such care is taken in the selection and smelting that their bars and ingots bring a better price in the English market than those of either Lota or Guayacan.”
Copper in 1867
08/18/2009 15:22
From the 1867 American Journal of Mining
This is the publication that would later be known as the Engineering and Mining Journal. In its fifth (?) year, the main feature of the journal were narrative accounts of the news from the major mining areas, organized by the mineral mined. The March 30 1867 edition, for example, contains nearly five columns describing Copper-mining events in Montana, Michigan, and Arizona. At the time, Michigan was the leader in production, and the Calumet mine already the leader in Michigan. Technology was a major focus, the Michigan column describing new machinery at the Isle Royale mill, says: “Never having seen the Chilian mills—on which this simply claims to an improvement—work, we have preferred to maks no speculations, pro. or con. on the subject.” Clearly, the state of Chilean technology and of Chile as a competitor in the copper market, was already well established in the minds of journal readers.
In at least a full page, every other issue, the journal reviews the various mineral markets. A note from San Francisco dated Feb. 23 1867 mentions the “high price of freight and the low price of ores in the markets of Swansea and Boston have had a very depressing effect on the California copper mining interest.” This is a reminder that the only way to move ore from the west coast to the east was still by ship, around South America. A huge advantage to Chilean miners.
March 8 1867: “Chili bars L73, buyers in Liverpool.” (“Dock Edwards” is at Birkenhead, in Liverpool)
April 5 1867: “Chili bars in Liverpool have been done at L71 10s. and L71 5s. the West India Mail which arrived on Wednesday, has brought advices of shipment of only about 800 tons copper from Chili, which may strengthen our market.” (Von Dadelszen and North, correspondents) (4 East India Avenue)
April 12 1867 “the panic in the Stock Exchange, and the complicated affairs of continental politics” blamed for stagnant market. “Chili bars in Liverpool, L71 10s. to L72.”
June 1 1867 edition quotes “The Lake Superior (Ontonagon) Miner asks the question, ‘Shall we work or suspend?’…The stock of copper on hand April 1st, 1867, is about the same as in April, 1866, showing a consumption in 1866 of 24,000,000 in the United States, none exported.” (in fact, it shows 1,200,000 of “Foreign refined copper” imported). Goes on to claim, “the Chilian mines, it is said, are losing money at present prices, and are not likely to continue many months at this rate.” Is this true? The industry was lobbying heavily for tariffs at this point…
May 17 1867 London report: “An animated business was reported both in Foreign and English copper, the former taking the lead…Chili bars L72 10s. spot and L73 to arrive…Since the arrival of the Chili mail advising shipments of about 2,200 tons of pure copper in a fortnight, buyers have withdrawn, and prices fell 20s. per ton lower.”
May 31 1867: “The last mail from Chili having brought advice of smaller shipments (1,300 tons copper), the market is rather better…” (no Chile price quoted) (this probably from mid-June issue)
July 1 1867 “Copper Trade Circular” from Baltimore says “Copper mining has become extremely adventurous, and these mines that cannot produce native copper at less than 22 cents per lb. or ores less than $30 per ton delivered at navigable shore, cannot expect to live…Ingot Copper ranges at 23 ½ @ 24 ½, being 4 per cent. below the cost of production. Smelters have reduced operations very much and the overstock in the country is fast being redced by consumption. The Lake Superior companies are free sellers, and at the ruling prices large investments have been made on speculation. The Baltimore smelters intend holding their copper over until next Spring, when it is likely better prices will rule.”
July 20 1867 edition features a new “London Copper Trade” column by Vivian, Younger, and Bond. Installment dated June 21: The Chili advices referred to in our last have had their effect all through the week, and transactions have been very exceptional and difficult. Towards the close, however, there seems to be a little more disposition to make business both on the part of sellers and buyers, each showing some signs of giving way a little. The result of the continued low prices seems to have been to rid the market of the weak holders of English copper who went into the article during the Hispano-Chilian war, and also to bring down the price of the raw material to a more reasonable relative value, as compared with the prices of English copper. these two things should give a healthier tone to the article, for such demand as there is now goes to the smelters, and so more directly helps off the stocks. the want of demand, however, continues to be very much felt. We report sales of Chili bars at from L69 to L70 per ton, and of about 2,000 tons of ore and regulus at 14s. per unit. we have heard of no sales in fine foreign copper.”
Von Dadelszen and North’s report (just below) has “Chili bars, L70 10s., sellers.”
VYB June 28 write “The business done in Chili bars and ingots early in the week has been very considerable, the total being about 1,600, principally for shipment to France. Prices have advanced about 10s. to 20s. per ton, the transactions we report having taken place at L68 10s. to L69 10s. for bars, and L78 to L78 10s. for ingots. Holders now ask L70 for the former, and L79 for the latter…The Chili mail, received yesterday, advised only 1,200 tons of fine copper, 700 tons in bars, and 500 tons in ores and regulus, from May 3 to 17, 1867, as against 1,780 tons the same time last year.”
July 12 1867 “Metal Report” says “Copper has again turned in buyers’ favor…Chili bars, L89, in Liverpool.” Must be typo for L69.
August 3 1867 “Metal Report” says “Copper has been very sick. The last Chili mail advised charters for about 1,900 tons pure copper, of which two-thirds is in bars, which is a large quantity.”
Just below, VYB report “Transactions in all kinds have been extremely limited, and although importers of Chilian copper produce are somewhat higher in their views, this does not seem to be warranted by the course of events. the result [sic], indeed, has been an almost total absence of business. there are, in fact, no sales of the least importance in Chili produce to record. As to English tough cake, it has been sold at L74, the lowest price ever known in the copper trade, except in the year 1782. Sheet copper for India has been parted with at L77…a lower price than has ever been known before…It is very disheartening to such considerable shipments reported from the West Coast by each mail, at rates which must leave the importers serious losers; in fact, the sanguine feelings which still prevailed in Chili as tot eh future of copper is one of the worst features of the market, as tending to keep production up to its full average. With very limited consumption, and no aid from speculation, it seems clear that nothing but really short exports from the West can restore the market to a healthy tone.”
August 16 1867 Metal Report announ ces “A better feeling has come over the market, owing to warlike advices from Chili; holders are not pressing sellers, and in some instances an advance of one or two points has been established…Chili bars in Liverpool, L69 10s. to L70, buyers. Ore sold at 14s. 3d.; most holders ask 15s.”
VY&B (date Aug. 17 1867) say “There has been more business doing, and the advanced prices asked have been more readily paid. Some of the English smelters have shown themselves desirous of being provided with furnace material, rather than being found short of stock in the present unsettled state of the market. The principal transactions in Chili produce since our last have been about 1,000 tons of ores, at 13s. 10d. to 14s. per unit; 600 tons of regulus, at the latter figure, and 150 tons of bars, at L65 10s. and L69 per ton. For bars, L69 10s. is now asked, and for ores and regulus, 14s. 3d. per unit…The mail from Chli brings advices of about 1,700 tons of copper produce having been chartered for, half in bars and the remainder in ores and regulus, with a list of sales amounting to nearly the same quantity of fine copper, prices in Valparaiso having slightly improved, and freights being rather higher. The general feeling in the market here is better, and the tendency on the part of holders of copper (who can conveniently do so) is to keep it at present, in the hope of a future improvement being established.”
The September 3 1867 “Metal Circular” (marked New York – possibly written by the AJM editor?) says “Copper has been quiet, but with a steady demand for consumption, the price has gradually advanced from 26 3/8 @ 26 ½ c. for Detroit, 26c. for Portage Lake, and 25 ¾ @ 26 c. for Baltimore. For the end of September and October delivery ¼ and ½ c. more is paid. The arrivals from Lake Superior are small, and the companies have little to sell. The stocks are almost entirely in the hands of parties who bought for investment or on speculation, and who look for much higher prices in the face of such advices as have just been received from England. The low price and the cheap money have at last begun to tell, and the London market rose in the last fortnight of August from L67 10s. to L74 in Chili pig, with every prospect of a further advance when the position of the article is fully understood. The remarks made in my circular of 30th July, in regard to our market, also apply to the European markets. A vague impression has prevailed that the production of Copper had increased wonderfully, bt that the consumption decreased. It was founded on the uninterrupted supply from Chili in 1865 and 1866, during and after the Chili-Spanish war, andn the dullness of business in the East Indies, Germany and France, the three largest consumers of British Copper. But now an improved demand for the East Indies has sprung up, and the shipments from Chili begin to fall off at the same time that the production in Cornwall, Australia, California and Lake Superior shows a marked decrease. The next twelve months are likely to see a great rise in the price of Copper and Tin. Both articles have been unreasonably depressed, far below the average of former years, and the reaction will be the more severe. There are no orders for export. 100,000 lbs. Minnesota will be cleared early in August for Hamburg. The total shipments this year amount to one million of pounds.”
In an August 23 1867 Metal Report (printed after the Sept 3 note above), Von Dadelzen [sic] and North say “The market has been much firmer, and holders less willing to sell, pending further news from Chili…Chili bars, in Liverpool, have advanced to L70 and L75 10s. to arrive.”
VY&B (same date) agree: “The firmness evinced by holders, especially of Chili produce in Liverpool, has resulted in a further improvement in prices of that description, bringing the figure for spot bars, good brands, up to 70l., whilst 14s. 6d. has been refused for a cargo of regulus to arrive. The actual business done has been only moderate—120 tons spot bars, 69l. 10s. to 70l.; 120 tons bars to arrive, 70l., 10s. to 70l. 15s; 20 tons Urmeneta ingots, 78l., cash; 600 tons of ore (half Canadian) sold at 14s. 3d. per unit, and 160 tons of argentiferous regulus at 14s. 2d. per unit. At the present moment there are no sellers of bars to arrive at 71l.”
An additional section on the “French and German Metal Markets” says “Advices from Havre indicate more stability in the price of copper at that port, and also induce an impression of a revival of activity in the article. for 20 tons of disposable Chilian, in bars, 69l. 10s. per ton has been paid (Paris conditions;) since then the tone of the article has been a little firmer.” Raises the interesting question of how much Chilean copper went (directly?) to European markets other than London…
September 6 1867 the Weekly Metal Report says “Copper is a shade easier, but holders are firm…Chili is in buyers’ favor, and quoted L72 10s. for bars, L92 for ingot. Ore and regulus, 14s. 9d. to 15s. per unit.”
By October 25 1867, “Chili bars sold at L69,” suggesting a “dull and slack” market.
November 15 1867: “Nothing new to report…Chili bars, in Liverpool, have advanced to L69.”
The “Metal Circular,” date December 2 1867, New York, says “Copper has improved a little in price in the beginning of November, and has since been steady at 22 and 22 ¼ c. for Baltimore; 22 7/8 and 23 c. for Portage Lake, and 23 and 23 ¼ for Detroit…The London market has declined to the lowest figure of last June, viz: L67 and L67 10s. for Chili Pig. the shipments from Chili, which for a short time showed a falling off, had again increased and this has depressed the European markets.”
A column in the November 9 1867 edition announces “Another Trans-Continental Railway” and describes a plan by Chile and Argentina to build a railroad “to cross the Andes upon the plain known as the Plancheon.” The company, formed in Buenos Aires, has applied for a “grant of land upon both sides of the track, upon which they propose to establish colonies.” The initial colonists proposed are Germans, and the engineer in charge is a German named Otto Von Armen. This is interesting – did it ever get built? What about the colonization scheme?
Another column titled “Copper Mining,” in the December 14 1867 issue, says “A California paper discourses upon the condition and prospects of copper mining as follows: One of the chief demands of copper of late years has been for locomotives. There is, on average, one engine for every three miles of railroad, and two tons of copper are put into every large locomotive, so that three mles of railroad demand two tons of copper.” How many locomotives are produced annually? What are the other big users of copper, year by year? and how do they change as technology develops? Until the BIG change – electricity. I need to do a demand-side review of copper fairly soon.
This is the publication that would later be known as the Engineering and Mining Journal. In its fifth (?) year, the main feature of the journal were narrative accounts of the news from the major mining areas, organized by the mineral mined. The March 30 1867 edition, for example, contains nearly five columns describing Copper-mining events in Montana, Michigan, and Arizona. At the time, Michigan was the leader in production, and the Calumet mine already the leader in Michigan. Technology was a major focus, the Michigan column describing new machinery at the Isle Royale mill, says: “Never having seen the Chilian mills—on which this simply claims to an improvement—work, we have preferred to maks no speculations, pro. or con. on the subject.” Clearly, the state of Chilean technology and of Chile as a competitor in the copper market, was already well established in the minds of journal readers.
March 8 1867: “Chili bars L73, buyers in Liverpool.” (“Dock Edwards” is at Birkenhead, in Liverpool)
April 5 1867: “Chili bars in Liverpool have been done at L71 10s. and L71 5s. the West India Mail which arrived on Wednesday, has brought advices of shipment of only about 800 tons copper from Chili, which may strengthen our market.” (Von Dadelszen and North, correspondents) (4 East India Avenue)
April 12 1867 “the panic in the Stock Exchange, and the complicated affairs of continental politics” blamed for stagnant market. “Chili bars in Liverpool, L71 10s. to L72.”
June 1 1867 edition quotes “The Lake Superior (Ontonagon) Miner asks the question, ‘Shall we work or suspend?’…The stock of copper on hand April 1st, 1867, is about the same as in April, 1866, showing a consumption in 1866 of 24,000,000 in the United States, none exported.” (in fact, it shows 1,200,000 of “Foreign refined copper” imported). Goes on to claim, “the Chilian mines, it is said, are losing money at present prices, and are not likely to continue many months at this rate.” Is this true? The industry was lobbying heavily for tariffs at this point…
May 17 1867 London report: “An animated business was reported both in Foreign and English copper, the former taking the lead…Chili bars L72 10s. spot and L73 to arrive…Since the arrival of the Chili mail advising shipments of about 2,200 tons of pure copper in a fortnight, buyers have withdrawn, and prices fell 20s. per ton lower.”
May 31 1867: “The last mail from Chili having brought advice of smaller shipments (1,300 tons copper), the market is rather better…” (no Chile price quoted) (this probably from mid-June issue)
July 1 1867 “Copper Trade Circular” from Baltimore says “Copper mining has become extremely adventurous, and these mines that cannot produce native copper at less than 22 cents per lb. or ores less than $30 per ton delivered at navigable shore, cannot expect to live…Ingot Copper ranges at 23 ½ @ 24 ½, being 4 per cent. below the cost of production. Smelters have reduced operations very much and the overstock in the country is fast being redced by consumption. The Lake Superior companies are free sellers, and at the ruling prices large investments have been made on speculation. The Baltimore smelters intend holding their copper over until next Spring, when it is likely better prices will rule.”
July 20 1867 edition features a new “London Copper Trade” column by Vivian, Younger, and Bond. Installment dated June 21: The Chili advices referred to in our last have had their effect all through the week, and transactions have been very exceptional and difficult. Towards the close, however, there seems to be a little more disposition to make business both on the part of sellers and buyers, each showing some signs of giving way a little. The result of the continued low prices seems to have been to rid the market of the weak holders of English copper who went into the article during the Hispano-Chilian war, and also to bring down the price of the raw material to a more reasonable relative value, as compared with the prices of English copper. these two things should give a healthier tone to the article, for such demand as there is now goes to the smelters, and so more directly helps off the stocks. the want of demand, however, continues to be very much felt. We report sales of Chili bars at from L69 to L70 per ton, and of about 2,000 tons of ore and regulus at 14s. per unit. we have heard of no sales in fine foreign copper.”
Von Dadelszen and North’s report (just below) has “Chili bars, L70 10s., sellers.”
VYB June 28 write “The business done in Chili bars and ingots early in the week has been very considerable, the total being about 1,600, principally for shipment to France. Prices have advanced about 10s. to 20s. per ton, the transactions we report having taken place at L68 10s. to L69 10s. for bars, and L78 to L78 10s. for ingots. Holders now ask L70 for the former, and L79 for the latter…The Chili mail, received yesterday, advised only 1,200 tons of fine copper, 700 tons in bars, and 500 tons in ores and regulus, from May 3 to 17, 1867, as against 1,780 tons the same time last year.”
July 12 1867 “Metal Report” says “Copper has again turned in buyers’ favor…Chili bars, L89, in Liverpool.” Must be typo for L69.
August 3 1867 “Metal Report” says “Copper has been very sick. The last Chili mail advised charters for about 1,900 tons pure copper, of which two-thirds is in bars, which is a large quantity.”
Just below, VYB report “Transactions in all kinds have been extremely limited, and although importers of Chilian copper produce are somewhat higher in their views, this does not seem to be warranted by the course of events. the result [sic], indeed, has been an almost total absence of business. there are, in fact, no sales of the least importance in Chili produce to record. As to English tough cake, it has been sold at L74, the lowest price ever known in the copper trade, except in the year 1782. Sheet copper for India has been parted with at L77…a lower price than has ever been known before…It is very disheartening to such considerable shipments reported from the West Coast by each mail, at rates which must leave the importers serious losers; in fact, the sanguine feelings which still prevailed in Chili as tot eh future of copper is one of the worst features of the market, as tending to keep production up to its full average. With very limited consumption, and no aid from speculation, it seems clear that nothing but really short exports from the West can restore the market to a healthy tone.”
August 16 1867 Metal Report announ ces “A better feeling has come over the market, owing to warlike advices from Chili; holders are not pressing sellers, and in some instances an advance of one or two points has been established…Chili bars in Liverpool, L69 10s. to L70, buyers. Ore sold at 14s. 3d.; most holders ask 15s.”
VY&B (date Aug. 17 1867) say “There has been more business doing, and the advanced prices asked have been more readily paid. Some of the English smelters have shown themselves desirous of being provided with furnace material, rather than being found short of stock in the present unsettled state of the market. The principal transactions in Chili produce since our last have been about 1,000 tons of ores, at 13s. 10d. to 14s. per unit; 600 tons of regulus, at the latter figure, and 150 tons of bars, at L65 10s. and L69 per ton. For bars, L69 10s. is now asked, and for ores and regulus, 14s. 3d. per unit…The mail from Chli brings advices of about 1,700 tons of copper produce having been chartered for, half in bars and the remainder in ores and regulus, with a list of sales amounting to nearly the same quantity of fine copper, prices in Valparaiso having slightly improved, and freights being rather higher. The general feeling in the market here is better, and the tendency on the part of holders of copper (who can conveniently do so) is to keep it at present, in the hope of a future improvement being established.”
The September 3 1867 “Metal Circular” (marked New York – possibly written by the AJM editor?) says “Copper has been quiet, but with a steady demand for consumption, the price has gradually advanced from 26 3/8 @ 26 ½ c. for Detroit, 26c. for Portage Lake, and 25 ¾ @ 26 c. for Baltimore. For the end of September and October delivery ¼ and ½ c. more is paid. The arrivals from Lake Superior are small, and the companies have little to sell. The stocks are almost entirely in the hands of parties who bought for investment or on speculation, and who look for much higher prices in the face of such advices as have just been received from England. The low price and the cheap money have at last begun to tell, and the London market rose in the last fortnight of August from L67 10s. to L74 in Chili pig, with every prospect of a further advance when the position of the article is fully understood. The remarks made in my circular of 30th July, in regard to our market, also apply to the European markets. A vague impression has prevailed that the production of Copper had increased wonderfully, bt that the consumption decreased. It was founded on the uninterrupted supply from Chili in 1865 and 1866, during and after the Chili-Spanish war, andn the dullness of business in the East Indies, Germany and France, the three largest consumers of British Copper. But now an improved demand for the East Indies has sprung up, and the shipments from Chili begin to fall off at the same time that the production in Cornwall, Australia, California and Lake Superior shows a marked decrease. The next twelve months are likely to see a great rise in the price of Copper and Tin. Both articles have been unreasonably depressed, far below the average of former years, and the reaction will be the more severe. There are no orders for export. 100,000 lbs. Minnesota will be cleared early in August for Hamburg. The total shipments this year amount to one million of pounds.”
In an August 23 1867 Metal Report (printed after the Sept 3 note above), Von Dadelzen [sic] and North say “The market has been much firmer, and holders less willing to sell, pending further news from Chili…Chili bars, in Liverpool, have advanced to L70 and L75 10s. to arrive.”
VY&B (same date) agree: “The firmness evinced by holders, especially of Chili produce in Liverpool, has resulted in a further improvement in prices of that description, bringing the figure for spot bars, good brands, up to 70l., whilst 14s. 6d. has been refused for a cargo of regulus to arrive. The actual business done has been only moderate—120 tons spot bars, 69l. 10s. to 70l.; 120 tons bars to arrive, 70l., 10s. to 70l. 15s; 20 tons Urmeneta ingots, 78l., cash; 600 tons of ore (half Canadian) sold at 14s. 3d. per unit, and 160 tons of argentiferous regulus at 14s. 2d. per unit. At the present moment there are no sellers of bars to arrive at 71l.”
An additional section on the “French and German Metal Markets” says “Advices from Havre indicate more stability in the price of copper at that port, and also induce an impression of a revival of activity in the article. for 20 tons of disposable Chilian, in bars, 69l. 10s. per ton has been paid (Paris conditions;) since then the tone of the article has been a little firmer.” Raises the interesting question of how much Chilean copper went (directly?) to European markets other than London…
September 6 1867 the Weekly Metal Report says “Copper is a shade easier, but holders are firm…Chili is in buyers’ favor, and quoted L72 10s. for bars, L92 for ingot. Ore and regulus, 14s. 9d. to 15s. per unit.”
By October 25 1867, “Chili bars sold at L69,” suggesting a “dull and slack” market.
November 15 1867: “Nothing new to report…Chili bars, in Liverpool, have advanced to L69.”
The “Metal Circular,” date December 2 1867, New York, says “Copper has improved a little in price in the beginning of November, and has since been steady at 22 and 22 ¼ c. for Baltimore; 22 7/8 and 23 c. for Portage Lake, and 23 and 23 ¼ for Detroit…The London market has declined to the lowest figure of last June, viz: L67 and L67 10s. for Chili Pig. the shipments from Chili, which for a short time showed a falling off, had again increased and this has depressed the European markets.”
A column in the November 9 1867 edition announces “Another Trans-Continental Railway” and describes a plan by Chile and Argentina to build a railroad “to cross the Andes upon the plain known as the Plancheon.” The company, formed in Buenos Aires, has applied for a “grant of land upon both sides of the track, upon which they propose to establish colonies.” The initial colonists proposed are Germans, and the engineer in charge is a German named Otto Von Armen. This is interesting – did it ever get built? What about the colonization scheme?
Another column titled “Copper Mining,” in the December 14 1867 issue, says “A California paper discourses upon the condition and prospects of copper mining as follows: One of the chief demands of copper of late years has been for locomotives. There is, on average, one engine for every three miles of railroad, and two tons of copper are put into every large locomotive, so that three mles of railroad demand two tons of copper.” How many locomotives are produced annually? What are the other big users of copper, year by year? and how do they change as technology develops? Until the BIG change – electricity. I need to do a demand-side review of copper fairly soon.
Playing God?
08/17/2009 19:24
Robert Darnton, “Skeletons in the Closet” (Chapter 8 of George Washington’s False Teeth, 2003)
Is it necessary to point out that there’s a little element of personality cult going on here? Darnton’s personal memoir is interesting, because it’s Darnton. His observations about the historian’s role are almost an afterthought – a justification for the memoir?
Facts have indeed gone soft – or it’s finally been admitted they were soft all along. But do biographers REALLY believe they’re digging out “nuggets of reality” any more or less than they ever did? The “nuggets” –whether you’re writing a nonfiction biography or a historical fiction—are what anchors your story to something that the reader can recognize as an acceptable story. Or story-world; since may of those “facts” go toward establishing setting and populating the story with characters for your subject to interact with. We can never know the “real” Virginia Woolf. Did anybody? EVER? But surely, we can (even if we’re non-specialists, reading popular history) sense when a particular depiction might be “realer” than a competing account.
Darnton doesn’t really describe his own decision-making process in full, and I’d be interested to know more of the details of his Brissot story. He had a manuscript in a drawer for thirty years, but all of a sudden he’s writing a “protective prolegomenon.” What changed? Why did he decide to go ahead with the project now? How might the manuscript need to change, after all these years?
It DOES sound like Brissot’s life would make a good story. Not least because he isn’t a straight-ahead hero. It seems like post-hagiographical bios are “in” right now, and a guy who had a second-rate publishing career, followed by a brief period of power in Revolutionary France; who visited America and may have been a police spy, might make an excellent subject. If you wanted to portray the times as chaotic, a period when even the revolutionaries didn’t agree much, and where loyalties were nearly impossible to maintain.
Darnton gave up the Brissot project when he took up the one that would define his career. That’s fair. But it’s a long step from there to the question of whether Brissot is worth the trouble. Is that doubt justified – or is Darnton suggesting that NO individual is worth the trouble. That using a well-known figure as “the incarnation of a crucial process” is in fact illegitimate.
I’ll agree that finding “the key to Brissot’s life” and building a birth-to-death narrative around it seems a little old-fashioned, and might even be “playing God.” But the other issue, “pronouncing verdicts about…individuals I had never met,” seems entirely within the scope of what a historian/biographer is understood to do. If the (brand-new, previously unknown) evidence says that Marat was in France when he was thought to have been in England, then by all means say so! I think the court-room analogy is a much better one than the “playing God” one. It suggests reasonable doubt as a standard, rather than omniscient certainty.
Darnton’s discovery, that previous biographers had followed Brissot’s memoirs too credulously, suggests a change in our interests. In the era of great men, Brissot was considered a philosopher because that’s what he claimed to be. But when Darnton “began to read his works against the grain, they lost their luster.” Is this a nice way of saying that Brissot’s ideas and writing were second-rate, and that close reading of the primary texts made this fact painfully obvious?
The police-spying question is fascinating, because it points the spotlight on Brissot’s place in the actual setting in which he lived. Not in his books, pamphlets and memoirs. What did he do, and how did it square with the “public image” he tried to create? How did his contemporaries actually view Brissot? And, what did they base their opinions on?
Erik Erikson’s screen memory is a reminder of Dr. House’s first law: everybody lies. But a sophisticated biographer (and reader of biographies) would know that without being warned. The more interesting observation is, that Darnton found a lot of his own biography in the 1968 paper he wrote on Brissot. The ever darker patterns he arranged his facts into were apparently predetermined ones Darnton chose unconsciously. Were they also interests of the times? The sixties may have been “looking” for different stories and patterns than the 2000s are…but is this “discourse,” or the spirit of the times?
Is the appeal to discourse really necessary? Do we really need to deconstruct history and biography to answer Darnton’s concerns? Or just apply common sense and avoid over-reaching in our truth claims? In the end, as Darnton says, all lives are probably “a bundle of contradictions,” and none is an unambiguous metaphor for any historical insight (except maybe, complexity). So, the onus is on the author, to avoid narrative determinism. Unless he’s writing a novel – in which case he should say so and revel in it.
Facts have indeed gone soft – or it’s finally been admitted they were soft all along. But do biographers REALLY believe they’re digging out “nuggets of reality” any more or less than they ever did? The “nuggets” –whether you’re writing a nonfiction biography or a historical fiction—are what anchors your story to something that the reader can recognize as an acceptable story. Or story-world; since may of those “facts” go toward establishing setting and populating the story with characters for your subject to interact with. We can never know the “real” Virginia Woolf. Did anybody? EVER? But surely, we can (even if we’re non-specialists, reading popular history) sense when a particular depiction might be “realer” than a competing account.
Darnton doesn’t really describe his own decision-making process in full, and I’d be interested to know more of the details of his Brissot story. He had a manuscript in a drawer for thirty years, but all of a sudden he’s writing a “protective prolegomenon.” What changed? Why did he decide to go ahead with the project now? How might the manuscript need to change, after all these years?
It DOES sound like Brissot’s life would make a good story. Not least because he isn’t a straight-ahead hero. It seems like post-hagiographical bios are “in” right now, and a guy who had a second-rate publishing career, followed by a brief period of power in Revolutionary France; who visited America and may have been a police spy, might make an excellent subject. If you wanted to portray the times as chaotic, a period when even the revolutionaries didn’t agree much, and where loyalties were nearly impossible to maintain.
Darnton gave up the Brissot project when he took up the one that would define his career. That’s fair. But it’s a long step from there to the question of whether Brissot is worth the trouble. Is that doubt justified – or is Darnton suggesting that NO individual is worth the trouble. That using a well-known figure as “the incarnation of a crucial process” is in fact illegitimate.
I’ll agree that finding “the key to Brissot’s life” and building a birth-to-death narrative around it seems a little old-fashioned, and might even be “playing God.” But the other issue, “pronouncing verdicts about…individuals I had never met,” seems entirely within the scope of what a historian/biographer is understood to do. If the (brand-new, previously unknown) evidence says that Marat was in France when he was thought to have been in England, then by all means say so! I think the court-room analogy is a much better one than the “playing God” one. It suggests reasonable doubt as a standard, rather than omniscient certainty.
Darnton’s discovery, that previous biographers had followed Brissot’s memoirs too credulously, suggests a change in our interests. In the era of great men, Brissot was considered a philosopher because that’s what he claimed to be. But when Darnton “began to read his works against the grain, they lost their luster.” Is this a nice way of saying that Brissot’s ideas and writing were second-rate, and that close reading of the primary texts made this fact painfully obvious?
The police-spying question is fascinating, because it points the spotlight on Brissot’s place in the actual setting in which he lived. Not in his books, pamphlets and memoirs. What did he do, and how did it square with the “public image” he tried to create? How did his contemporaries actually view Brissot? And, what did they base their opinions on?
Erik Erikson’s screen memory is a reminder of Dr. House’s first law: everybody lies. But a sophisticated biographer (and reader of biographies) would know that without being warned. The more interesting observation is, that Darnton found a lot of his own biography in the 1968 paper he wrote on Brissot. The ever darker patterns he arranged his facts into were apparently predetermined ones Darnton chose unconsciously. Were they also interests of the times? The sixties may have been “looking” for different stories and patterns than the 2000s are…but is this “discourse,” or the spirit of the times?
Is the appeal to discourse really necessary? Do we really need to deconstruct history and biography to answer Darnton’s concerns? Or just apply common sense and avoid over-reaching in our truth claims? In the end, as Darnton says, all lives are probably “a bundle of contradictions,” and none is an unambiguous metaphor for any historical insight (except maybe, complexity). So, the onus is on the author, to avoid narrative determinism. Unless he’s writing a novel – in which case he should say so and revel in it.
